TABLE OF CONTENTS You can manage an IS project just as well as you can manage a capital building project. Even if you re using the bleeding edge of technology, you can still succeed through careful planning, scheduling and monitoring.
T. Winter, cited in Scheier, R., From Hard Hat to Hard Drive (1995)
IT projects can be successfully managed in much the same way as any other project. To do this the project management needs to carefully focus on the continuous evaluation of the project. In fact the measuring and management of IT costs and benefits needs to be an integral part of IT project management as well as the day-to-day management of an organization s computer-based systems. The purpose of this chapter is to explain how to set up evaluation as part of project management.
The process of management, and especially project management, is a repeated cycle of planning, resourcing, execution and control activities, which can be seen in Figure 14.1.
The control phase involves the evaluation of what has gone before and decision making to support the renewal of the planning and management exercise. The cycle of resourcing and execution is then repeated.
Central to evaluation is the process of measuring or assessing the merit or deficiencies of past performance.
The key practical issues of an evaluation process, especially from a project management point of view, are when is the evaluation to be done, who is...
